Our world in words : the business implications of word use in online conversations

As online text-based conversations are growing rapidly, business models are increasingly re-organized to incorporate and manage customers’ online conversations. But managing online customers and their conversations is far from easy. This study offers insights, how word uses relate to conversants’ perceptions and behaviors but also impact the audience. It shows that word uses are a key to understand and manage online customer conversations. Along these lines the study offers specific suggestions to managers involved in managing user-communities and online retail sites, such as assessing the social integration of community members by text-mining and monitoring their linguistic styles.